The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  ETHEL FLORENCE LINDESAY RICHARDSON was born into an affluent Melbourne family in 1870. Her father, Walter, was a doctor of medicine. When Richardson was nine he died of syphilis after being admitted to Melbourne’s Kew mental asylum. His illness and suffering had a huge impact on his family.

  After his death, Richardson’s mother took her children to Maldon, where she worked as the postmistress.

  Richardson was sent to board at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in 1883—an experience that provided material for her novel The Getting of Wisdom. At school she developed into a talented pianist and tennis player.

  In 1888, she travelled to Europe with her mother and studied at the Leipzig Conservatorium, where she met John George Robertson, a Scottish expert in German literature. The pair married and settled in London. She published her first novel, Maurice Guest, in 1908. She took the pen name of Henry Handel Richardson and used it for all of her books.

  Richardson made her only journey back to Australia in 1912 to complete her research for the trilogy that would become The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. Her final novel, The Young Cosima, appeared in 1939. Henry Handel Richardson died in Sussex in 1946.

  PETER CRAVEN is one of Australia’s best-known literary critics. He was a founding editor of Scripsi, Quarterly Essay and the Best of anthologies.

  ALSO BY HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON

  Fiction

  Maurice Guest

  The Getting of Wisdom

  The Young Cosima

  Two Studies

  The End of a Childhood

  The Adventures of Cuffy Mahony

  Non-fiction

  Myself When Young

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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  Introduction copyright © Peter Craven 2012

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  First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1930

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  This edition of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony reproduces the text of the 1930 Heinemann edition, which gathered all three books in one volume.

  Cover design by WH Chong.

  Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller.

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters.

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922282

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921889

  Author: Richardson, Henry Handel, 1870-1946.

  Title: The fortunes of Richard Mahony / by Henry Handel Richardson; introduction by Peter Craven.

  Edition: 1st ed.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Gold mines and mining—Australia—19th century—Fiction. Domestic fiction. Australia—19th century—Fiction.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Craven, Peter.

  Dewey Number: A823.2

  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  No Success Like Failure by Peter Craven

  BOOK I:

  Australia Felix

  BOOK II:

  The Way Home

  BOOK III:

  Ultima Thule

  I

  Only Australia could have coughed up The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. A doctor on the goldfields meets a girl and makes good. He thrives, he fails, he goes off his head. He brings all his bright hopes crashing down around him because he has no capacity for practical life. Call that a national epic. No wonder we settled for the doggerel and the bushrangers.

  Patrick White read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony as a young man, working as a jackaroo, and thought it was wonderful. He was not wrong. You could argue that the impulse to create an Australian art of fiction filled with that sense of calamity that can rise to tragedy, an art exalted in its scope however rooted in the notations of naturalism, and open to the way Australia can impose itself on the geography of the imagination as a thing of doom, rather than good fortune, all harks back to Richard Mahony. White might have said, with some truth, that he had come out of that rubbishy Ballarat goldfield too.

  For some people the naturalism has always been the trouble with Richard Mahony. Germaine Greer wrote that Henry Handel Richardson chose to embrace the conventions of naturalism at precisely the moment when those conventions died. It’s a resounding judgement, though not one that can be sustained. Richard Mahony is a great, if belated, novel: Australia Felix was published in 1917, The Way Home in 1925 and Ultima Thule in 1929, seven years after Joyce’s Ulysses and the death of Proust.

  It is, of course, an old story that Australian achievement can be old-fashioned, that it can be illuminated by supernovas which are—definitionally—no longer there. Dates tell us something. Ethel Florence Lindsay Richardson (who needed a male moniker as surely as George Eliot did) was born in Melbourne in 1870. That’s a year before Proust, five years before Thomas Mann, three years after John Galsworthy and eight after Edith Wharton. And it’s three years before Ford Madox Ford was born.

  Well, she could never have got the formal perfection of The Good Soldier or the supple mediations between realism and interior monologue that make Tietjens in the trenches seem like such a luminous middle way between Joyce and Evelyn Waugh. She does not, like Thomas Mann, master an old method and go on to animate a new: Richard Mahony has none of the modernist concentration, the claustrophobic and colossal formal intensity of The Magic Mountain, but in its limited and lopsided way it has something of the same steadiness of gaze of Buddenbrooks even if the familial focus is narrower to the point of seeming microscopic. There is too something of the same sense of a stretch of time (the period from the gold rushes to, by way of irony, the boom of Marvellous Melbourne) being intimately and absolutely known. Henry Handel Richardson did not, like Galsworthy with his Forsytes, win the Nobel Prize (though she deserved to) but she has the sense of drama and the piercing poignancy that Edith Wharton gets in a nineteenth-century novel, after the letter, like The House of Mirth.

  Terence Davies filmed The House of Mirth and Gillian Anderson was staggering in it. And before that Martin Scorsese came as close as he ever could to Visconti with his film of The Age of Innocence. The difficulty with The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is that it has never become a shared myth by being filmed. Bruce Beresford, who filmed Richardson’s school story The Getting of Wisdom with such effortless authority, has written a screenplay of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony but no one, so far, will come within cooee of producing it.

  It might be a different story if David Lean had filmed Richard Mahony as he was edging towards epic in the 1950s. Or Tony Richardson, who made Ned Kelly, and described Australia as a beautiful country full of horrible people. It’s his father-in-law Michael Redgrave who I see as Mahony: the silver voice, the refined face, the capacity to represent an imperviousness which is the other side of excruciation.

  The voice of Mahony is an extraordinary thing in the way it wraps itself, delusively and magnetically, yes, mesmerically, round his wilfulness and his capacity to pluck suffering f
or himself and his loved ones as another man might pluck a flower.

  Why had he ever left Melbourne? What evil spirit had entered into him and driven him forth? What was that in him, over which he had no power, which proved incapable of adhesion to any soil or fixed abode? For he might arm himself, each time anew, with another motive for plucking up his roots: it remained mere ratiocination, a sop flung to his reason, and in no wise got at the heart of the matter. Wherein lay the fault, the defect, that had made of him throughout his life a hunted man?...harried from place to place, from country to country. Other men set up a goal, achieved it, and remained content. He had always been in flight.—But from what? Who were his pursuers? From what shadow did he run?—And in these endless nights, when he lay and searched his heart as never before, he thought he read the answer to the riddle. Himself he was the hunter and the hunted: the merciless in pursuit and the panting prey.

  Mahony’s predicament (which is never separate from his overweening blindness) is that his sense of his own superiority—which is real—is forever casting him down because he wears it like a fatality. Nowhere in Australian literature is there a more deadly and prophetic portrait of the national tendency (among intellectuals and other bright people) to see the singularity of the self as evidence of the fact—as a form of ontological entitlement rather than happenstance—that ego solus, yours truly, will always be the brightest person in any room. Whereas just this way of seeing things—which Mahony exhibits to the point of hubris—is the abiding face of national immaturity.

  This may be why a certain kind of Australian sensibility (literally or spiritually expatriated) resiles from this towering vertiginous tragedy. Mahony is mired in his Australianness even though ‘Australia’ in its various more or less comfortable manifestations is the destiny he shuns, starting with Ballarat where he first finds success.

  It’s not hard to see how the combination of factors that make up the obsessional power of Richardson’s masterpiece can come across with an all but crippling sense of embarrassment. That, I suspect, is the true source of the objection to the novel’s naturalism. In The Getting of Wisdom a limited part of Henry Handel Richardson’s experience is made to startle and soar through the guise of the school story. Societies which are worried about whether art is possible for them sometimes perpetrate literary achievement through the cover of writing for children. Everything from Huckleberry Finn to Kim to the novels of Sonya Harnett and The Getting of Wisdom does this.

  In The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by contrast, the raw material of the author’s background is utilised with an aptitude that might appear gargantuan and unbalanced. Young Ethel’s father was a doctor, a man of exceptional talent, who rose high and fell mightily. He turned his face from the light of Australian colonial success, was financially ruined and at one point certified as insane.

  It seems unpromising material for a three-volume nineteenth-century-style novel replete with section titles which resound with the grimmest kind of irony when we realise the horrors they disclose. And indeed the title itself is chief among those ironies because the pivot of the book is precisely ill luck or rather a kind of malign fortune, not quite identified with character as the demon agency of fate or reducible to simple misfortune.

  Yes, you can call it a mismatch of treatment and theme if you must but the limitations of the novel—not least the way it constantly seems on the point of disclosing a world it then shies away from—are trivial compared to its grandeurs which wring the heart. Henry Handel Richardson simply persists in the folly of her own literary conception. She is telling a story about what goes wrong with a career and a marriage that might be as concentrated as Thérèse Raquin and yet her instinct to link it up with the offcuts of the broad canvas of Australian life is what makes The Fortunes of Richard Mahony so riveting in its reality.

  It is funny to reflect that, in the century dominated by Proust and Joyce, each of whom used the raw material of life (never mind Swann and Bloom and the girls, the transpositions and transfigurations of personal sexual preference) as a sufficient literary dominion, Australia’s belated nineteenth-century novel, yielding the rich readerly satisfactions of life as it’s felt and sensed, should come so patently out of the skeletons in the author’s cupboard: the ruined mad father who forsook her when young and haunted her forever.

  II

  She was, of course, an Australian prodigy, young Ethel. She studied music in Leipzig as her fictional avatar in Mahony, the boy, Cuffy, never did. And by the time she was twenty-five she was married to J. G. Robertson, later professor of German at the University of London. Are there shades of George Eliot here, of Lewes, of Casaubon? Who knows? Only the work matters.

  The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is the great novel of that older Australia that lurched into nationhood like the aftermath to a bad dream. In a world that had cheered itself to Banjo Paterson and grown melancholy with Lawson and his bush undertaker this was the recapitulated image of a nation seen through the dark glass of the mind of a man whose grasp on life is so unsteady because it is essentially imaginative in a society that acknowledges no yardstick but material success. Or which he sees in this way because he interiorises a diminished version of its values. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is tightly focused on a man of great fineness who comes apart and the woman who cherishes him like a mother, a child, a saint. Mahony’s wife Mary (who starts life as Polly) is a magnificent portrait of a dark Geelong girl of sixteen who enacts the most extraordinary pietà over the husband who has become like a child whom she loves body and soul.

  The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is written in a high, nearly stiff style and incorporates a good deal of European polish, is stately, rhythmical, visually precise and full of the points of view and idioms of the characters it wrestles with. Sometimes, as in the myriad details of Mahony’s consciousness, the effect is of a sculpted narrowness that can formulate anything about the world but can never capture the blindness that attends its own insights. We see him following the will o’ the wisp of a more refined life in England, a more remunerative life in some new nook of Victoria, always isolated from everyone except his beloved wife, whom he cabins and confines so selfishly, but who continues to adore him no matter how cold-eyed she is about his futile apprehension of the treasure at the end of the rainbow. It is a superb portrait of a marriage and the way in which a couple can hoodwink themselves through the magic scattered by intelligence even in the teeth of idiocy.

  Here is Mary’s voice of female sanity:

  But that night—after a sheerly destructive evening, in which Mary had never ceased to plead with, to throw herself on the mercy of, an invisible opponent: I give you my word for it, he wasn’t himself that day...what with the awful heat...and the length of the drive...and the horse wouldn’t go...he was so upset over it. And then the loss of our little girl...that was a blow he has never properly got over. For he’s not a young man any more. He’s not what he was...any one will tell you that! But they’ll tell you, too, that he has never, never neglected a patient because of it. He’s the most conscientious of men...he has always worked to the last ounce of strength, put himself and the state of his own health last of all...I have known him tramp off of a morning when anybody with half an eye could see that he ought to be in bed. And so kindhearted! If a patient is poor, or has fallen on evil days, he will always treat him free of charge. Oh, surely people would need to have hearts of stone, to stand out against pleas such as these?

  It’s a workmanlike technique but the cumulative effect, through every detail of the articulation, is one of truth.

  Although it is variegated at every point in its local detail The Fortunes of Richard Mahony has a monolithic coherence (as well as a certain thematic monotony) that means that it should be read in one big gulp, more or less quickly, at a steady rate. It has a rich supporting cast but Richardson is never quite sure how interested in them she is. This is evident at one glittering extremity from the f
igure of the alienated pharmacist Mahony meets in Ballarat who is an even more recklessly articulate nihilist than he is. But it’s also there in the depiction of his early comrade-in-arms, Purdy, good-looking and cavalier in the Eureka days, who becomes bald and pudgy in middle age without losing the marvellous overheard quality of his dialogue.

  Henry Handel Richardson is splendid at her vernacular dialogue though her notation of it in a crypto-Dickensian spelling is often homophonically inept. She does, however, give repeated signs of having a broader and somewhat more populist range of skills than she chooses to concentrate in Richard Mahony. Characters are realised at one juncture and then fade offstage to be revived or not as the merest afterthought or convenience. This is lifelike (in the sense that it mirrors the randomness and serendipity of life) by some principle of absentmindedness but it suggests a nearly reckless disdain for structure and a lack of interest in the symbolic potency of the subordinate characters.

  Mary’s girlfriend, Tilly, a sane common Australian woman, is convincing but—given that she is an important figure who recurs, almost chorically, to put in her two bob’s worth about the misfortunes of the action and the further limits of Mahony’s miscalculations—we wish she were more integrated into the action as it stands. In practice The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is full of characters on the sidelines who are like the revenants of past lives. The scene, late in the piece, where the lawyer Ocock comes to Mary’s rescue—and we see tears in what have always been cold eyes—is the kind of touch we could do with a bit more of. Think, by way of contrast, of how the book kicks on when Richard and Mary’s son, Cuffy, appears because he serves as a foil to both his parents. Ultima Thule is illuminated by his voice. His shame at his father and his desperate blind pity for him which co-exists with his red-faced horror and confusion and loathing are beyond praise. So too is the moment when the old German professor realises he is a musical prodigy like his creator.